Perks & Quirks
For one thing, you don’t want to shoot this gun without the cartridges in moon clips. Those of us who have shot .45 ACP Smith revolvers with loose ACP round know that they will reliably go bang if you have a stock mainspring, but you may have to punch the empties out by hand because the ejector star can’t grab “rimless” cases. Headspace does not appear to allow that with 9mm ammo in the 929, however. I stuffed eight random 9mm ball rounds into the chambers, and pulled the double-action trigger eight times. The result was four unfired cartridges with untouched primers, two with tiny needle-like dings on the primers, one shallowly indented primer… and a single fired round and empty casing with its primer impressively smeared. The phrase, “Don’t try this at home, kids” comes to mind.
So, you’ll need the moon clips… but that’s not really a knock on the gun, because moon clip capability is part of this revolver’s raison d’etre. If you need 13 to 16 shots to complete your stage in an ICORE match and you’re running this 8-shooter, you’ll only need to reload once but the sixgunners will have to reload twice, and the unforgiving clock runs at the same pace for all. On a long assault course, you might only need three reloads where the six-shooter folks require four.
Bad news: The 929 comes with the internal lock S&W aficionados love to hate. Good news: the lock never screwed up, and on big N-frame, it doesn’t uglify the classic the way it does on smaller S&W’s.
Double-action trigger pull was smooth but heavy, a tad over 12 pounds, with the single-action press going about 4 pounds on the nose, crisp and backlash-free thanks to the trigger-mounted trigger stop. Due to headspace issues with springy moon clips, heavy pulls are standard on auto-caliber revolvers, but judicious custom gunsmithing can bring it down.
